Harl refused the release permit before he noticed Joss was sitting down.
“Removed from dispatch without authorization,” the clerk said.
“That’s stolen property.”
Tan stood beside Dema’s trolley, where they’d secured a chair behind its front rail.
Joss held the original removal order on his knee.
His ribs hurt less when he kept his back straight and stopped trying to turn toward every voice.
“So is a bridge,” he said.
The clerk looked beyond them at Len and Davi.
The warehouse guards had chosen to carry the witnesses’ page rather than return to work that morning.
“You were meant to clear the cellar.”
“Water cleared it,” Len said.
“We were still there.”
Harl’s fingers tightened around his ledger.
He knew enough to stop arguing in the open yard.
“The rail isn’t here.
Marshal Tovin collected the holding transfer.”
Tan set the permit against his chest.
“Then write where it went.”
He didn’t take the paper.
Joss kept his voice low.
“Your seal says receiver.
Your yard book says transferred.
We need the address before somebody says you personally kept it.”
Harl stared at the two former guards.
He could deny a courier.
Three different witnesses would make a less comfortable story.
He wrote a street code on the edge of the permit.
OLD CITY HINGE.
SOUTH ACCESS.
“That’s all I know.”
Harl underlined SOUTH ACCESS and pushed the permit back.
They left without entering dispatch again.
Tan turned the trolley toward the upper service lane, avoiding the flooded drain.
Len returned to help Nera maintain the partial crossing.
Davi stayed to guide the yard route; he’d delivered holding receipts through the hinge access before.
Halfway along the lane, Joss asked Tan to stop.
“I need air.”
She stopped immediately and set the trolley brake.
They sat beside a closed cooperage while the city woke above them.
Cart drivers shouted over the morning queue.
Somewhere behind a white wall, a woman practiced a flute badly enough that Joss could hear every hesitation.
He envied whoever had enough breath to waste it on that flute.
Tan took out the market notice from her pocket.
“Bren found a courier for the onions.
Two marks due tonight.
The trader keeps his stall.”
“Thank him for me.”
“You can thank him with the two marks.”
Her tone was plain.
He nodded and added the debt to the back of the wages page.
At the old city hinge, the street ended at a support yard built into the upper wall.
The map on Krail’s order showed a continuous stone terrace.
In front of Joss, that terrace was gone.
A cavity opened beneath Crownfall.
Its far edge disappeared under the white foundations.
Rows of iron sockets projected from the stone like empty shelves.
Some held dark carrier ribs wider than a man’s shoulders.
Others had clean marks where loads had recently been removed.
Joss got off the trolley with Tan’s help and walked the few steps to the inspection rail.
Below, a support block slid along a deep channel without anyone pulling it.
It carried the corner of a building.
The upper wall shifted with a grinding sound.
On the street above, the flute stopped.
Davi gripped the rail.
“That wasn’t open last month.”
Tan examined the nearest socket instead of the moving block.
A civic stamp had been cut into its lower face: a roof over three nested rectangles.
Joss unfolded the diagram from dispatch.
The same mark sat where the support lines converged.
CROWN WAREHOUSE.
“A warehouse under the city?” he asked.
“Old cargo infrastructure,” Tan said.
“More than one building, from that footprint.”
They could have climbed down the service rungs.
The moving channel offered a hundred questions.
Joss was good at turning questions into jobs no one had agreed to pay for.
An old delivery slot stood beside the inspection rail.
Somebody had jammed a child’s wooden horse into it, its painted wheels still bright.
A little brass tab above the slot read RECEIVING CLOSED.
Joss touched the tab.
It was warm despite the morning air.
Davi shook his head.
“Don’t leave anything in there.
We were told to clear the terrace when those light up.”
“What lights?”
“The stamp.”
Tan drew Joss’s hand away.
The nested rectangles on the nearest socket had begun glowing faintly amber.
Below them, the moving block turned into a side channel and vanished beneath a foundation wall.
The grinding stopped.
A balcony above settled half an inch, spilling dust onto the inspection rail.
Joss wanted the toy out of the slot.
Taking it would require reaching past the warm tab into a mechanism he couldn’t see.
He left it.
“Someone should know this is happening,” he said.
“We’ll tell Nera,” Tan replied.
“And the terrace workers.
That’s what we can do today.”
She sketched the socket and moving channel on the back of his permit, adding an arrow for the balcony’s shift.
Joss held the paper flat while she worked.
Dust kept settling on it from above.
He looked at the sketch of the receiver rail in his hand.
“We’re here for this,” he said.
Tan looked relieved.
“Then stay on the terrace.”
They followed the marked access around the cavity.
Joss walked only the level stretches.
Davi helped move the trolley over the broken steps.
Tan checked each narrow patch before they put its wheels on it.
The missing receiver half appeared beyond a row of old hoists.
It wasn’t lying in a store.
Tovin had fixed it inside a low wheeled rig built from two confiscated cargo sleds.
The rail’s coupling eye stood at waist height.
Above it, a hook assembly aimed toward the only clear approach through the yard.
Joss counted ground shoes beneath the rig.
Four.
All sound.
A load placed in that eye would feed pressure directly into the sled’s pullers.
Tovin meant to make the bridge frame rupture while his own rig stayed supported.
The marshal stood beside it, giving short instructions to two men fitting a chain.
He didn’t announce anything.
He checked the coupling, tried the brakes, and sent one worker to move a barrel out of the hook’s line.
Joss lowered himself behind an abandoned stone crate.
Tan crouched beside him.
“We can’t drag it out from here,” she whispered.
“No.”
“And you can’t take a pole strike in that chair.”
He watched a worker push a sheet of heavy plate against the rig.
Tovin rejected it because its frame bent at the corners.
A rigid shield could make the approach possible.
A frame with a straight hinge could keep the pull off Joss’s body.
“The door workshop,” he said.
Tan nodded.
“Abandoned civic fitters, two lanes east.
I know what they left.”
Davi shifted beside them.
His boot scraped stone.
Tovin looked up immediately.
Joss didn’t wait to see how much he’d noticed.
He got onto the trolley.
Tan pushed it toward the service lane while Davi kept the damaged chair rail quiet with his hand.
Behind them, Tovin called for someone to check the yard’s east exit.
Tan didn’t run until the ground widened enough that she could do it without throwing Joss off the chair.
He kept his breathing small, held the papers flat against his chest, and let somebody else choose how fast they could go.